


Wings So Bright

by Sholio



Category: White Collar
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Wingfic, Wings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-19
Updated: 2016-10-19
Packaged: 2018-08-23 09:20:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8322463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Neal's favorite memory from his early childhood was going flying with his mother. He didn't yet know that no one else could see her wings.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kanarek13](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kanarek13/gifts).



> For Kanarek13 in Collarcorner Fall Fest, and also for my h/c bingo "wings" square.

Neal's favorite memory from his early childhood was going flying with his mother.

She would hold him to her chest as the city fell away beneath them, his small arms curled around her neck. Her wings spread above them both, wings made of light that cast no shadows, gently translucent and rippling with a thousand subtle colors. The stars shone gently through them. Beneath the two of them, the city spread in a carpet of embers.

He was too young to ask why they weren't afraid that someone might see them flying, just as he was too young to ask why they had to go away.

 

***

 

Neal was five when his wings began to grow.

By now he was starting to be old enough to understand that he wasn't supposed to talk about flying with his mother, and old enough to notice that his mother was the only person whose wings he'd ever seen. His wings looked just like hers, in miniature: tiny translucent hawks' wings, curling above his shoulders. He learned how to concentrate to make them come out, spreading through his shirt and unfolding over his head.

Of course he had to try them; he didn't wait for his mother to show him how. His first attempts were jumps off the bed that usually resulted in Neal crashing to the floor, scraped and bruised and determined to try again. He was too small and his wings were too tiny and fragile to bear his weight. By the end of summer, though, he could feel the wind starting to catch him on the rare occasions when his mother took them up in the night sky. (She rarely went flying with him anymore, not like she used to.)

He didn't quite understand that the other children at kindergarten couldn't see his wings until little Bobby Meyers dared Neal to prove it, and he flew to the top of the swing set and jumped off and soared to the ground -- and they _still_ didn't believe it, and he was punished for lying.

His mother was very angry with him when she picked him up. Expecting sympathy, he was utterly baffled when she scolded him instead.

"They can't see your wings, you little idiot," she shouted at him. "You're going to make people notice us. You're going to make us have to move again!"

Later she was conciliatory and sorry. She cuddled with him on the couch and explained to him that even his father had never been able to see her wings -- it was the first time she'd talked about his father since they had to go away, and one of the last, except for occasional drunken ramblings.

"I think once he almost saw them," she murmured softly into Neal's hair. "One time, I saw it in his eyes ... but he couldn't quite believe it, and by morning, he couldn't see them at all."

It wasn't until later that she explained to Neal how their wings worked. "The only people who can see them, the only people who will ever see them, are people who love you for who you really are."

By that time, she didn't take him flying much at all. Neal practiced on his own, and he came slowly to understand that his mother had always relied on the cover of darkness and the fact that no bystander would ever believe they'd seen a woman and a small boy soaring through the night sky.

But she didn't want to fly anymore, not these days, when alcohol and drugs made her happier than her wings or Neal ever could. He learned how to fly by himself, and then he learned some of the other uses that wings could be put to ... such as getting up to the third floor of the building where he went to school and changing his grades if he needed to.

The day finally came, sometime in his mid-teens, when he spread his wings in the living room, something she'd always forbidden him to do, and realized that his mother could no longer see his wings.

By that point, he thought, she'd lost the ability to love anyone but herself.

He didn't start to wonder until much later when he'd last seen his mother's wings, and whether it was just that she'd stopped flying, or if he simply couldn't see them anymore, either.

 

***

 

By the time he met Mozzie, Neal had learned how useful his wings could be on jobs. No one could see them; if they saw anything, what they saw was a young man making impossible leaps between rooftops or from one level of a staircase to the next.

Over the years, he got good at learning to hide his flight when he used it. Disguising his wing-assisted jumps was just another kind of con, after all. The fact that other people couldn't see the wings was a help, not a burden.

And it also became second nature to make sure that no one who knew him well ever had a chance to see the wings. It would be trouble if they saw them, and if they didn't ... well, it just confirmed something he'd known all along, didn't it?

He especially made sure that Kate never saw them. She went to her grave never seeing his wings, not even once, and only afterwards, when it was too late, he wished he'd shown her.

It would have been nice to know.

 

***

 

He showed Peter his wings by accident three times.

The first time was on a job at the Met. Peter -- who was only Agent Burke then -- came about as close to catching him as anyone ever had. He had Neal cornered on the edge of the roof, and the choice was really no choice at all. Neal knew from experience that people always rationalized it away when they saw him fly. He leaped off the roof, let his wings expand in a glorious arc of rainbow color, and soared down from the roof of the Met to the sidewalk below.

Landing neatly, Neal looked up at the baffled and furious Agent Burke staring down at him. He really wished he could see Peter well enough to see the look on his face. And he wished even more that he could find out how Peter chose to spin this in his report.

Spinning on his heel, he sprinted away down the street before Peter recovered from his frozen bafflement to pursue him.

(He never did find out how Peter explained it, and once they started working together, he never could quite get up the nerve to ask.)

The second time was when he jumped out of the window of a judge's office after he was falsely accused and decided to escape. Peter watched -- dozens of people watched -- as Neal drifted down with his wings spread out to their full extent. The only trick to it was gliding in a fast enough swan dive that it looked like a natural fall while still braking enough to hit the awning at a speed where he merely bounced instead of ripping through it. Letting his wings collapse back into his shoulders, he swung down, met Peter's eyes for a split second (shades of that time at the Met, he thought irrelevantly) and then turned and ran.

Afterwards, actually for months afterwards, he occasionally turned the conversation in that direction if possible, just to make _sure_ that Peter hadn't seen anything he wasn't supposed to have seen.

"You took ten years off my life jumping out that window," was the only thing Peter had to say about it.

Apparently not.

And then there was the third time.

 

***

 

They were undercover as a jewel fence (Neal) and his bodyguard (Peter) and working on gaining the suspect's trust in a downtown Manhattan penthouse when the suspect caught on that he was being worked slowly into a corner and went ballistic. Everything was still going okay, or at least not irrecoverably bad, until the suspect swung a large ornamental stone vase into Peter's face and knocked him through the sliding glass balcony doors and over the balcony.

Forty stories above the street.

There was absolutely no question what Neal had to do, none at all. He didn't even think about it, just threw himself over the balcony railing and spread his wings. He flung himself into a dive, pumping his wings to catch up with Peter's tumbling shape, plummeting toward the ground and sure death on the pavement. Neal threw his arms around Peter, wings arching over them to brake them both. He didn't know how Peter was going to explain this, to other people or to himself. Didn't care, really. His arms dug into Peter's ribs and he saw Peter looking up, up into the blue sky -- 

Or at the rainbow-colored wings, made of translucent light, filling the sky above them.

They hit the sidewalk still going too fast, but not hard enough to smash them both to paste, or break both their legs -- instead they tumbled bruisingly to the pavement, breaking apart. Neal sat up, panting from the effort, and saw Peter propped up on his arms, staring at him. There was a bruise across the side of his face from being pasted with the vase, and a crimson web of tiny cuts from the glass.

"Freak wind," Neal said. It was all he could think of on the spur of the moment. He still kept seeing Peter plunging groundward in a lethal, endless fall --

"Freak _wind?"_ Peter repeated in a tone of disbelief, but then a swarm of FBI agents descended on them, followed by reporters. Neal allowed someone to wrap a blanket around his shoulders, and listened with some amusement to the snatches he caught of Peter repeatedly trying to explain their unbelievable survival as a freak wind of the sort that sometimes blew around tall buildings in Manhattan.

Peter kept glancing at him, long searching glances.

Neal was hoping to just slip away quietly, but instead, once the paramedics had been reassured that they were fine and the worst of the cuts on Peter's shoulder and cheekbones had been addressed, they were released and Peter promptly herded Neal in the direction of Peter's car. "You're coming home for dinner."

"I have plans," Neal tried.

"Oh? Specific plans? Felonious plans?"

Peter looked like he was fully intending to call Mozzie and confirm said (nonexistent) plans, so Neal gave up and let himself be corralled into the front seat of Peter's Ford and driven down to Brooklyn.

He expected to be grilled, but the drive proceeded in an oddly warm silence. Neal kept thinking back to what had happened at the penthouse. Peter should be asking him questions, he thought. Peter should be asking him all sorts of questions. If Peter _did_ see the wings, well, that was one entire set of questions right there, and if Peter didn't see the wings, a whole other set of questions presented itself. There was no way, no possible way, that Peter, with his insatiable curiosity, wasn't going to need an explanation for the impossible thing that had happened to both of them today. Whether or not he'd seen the wings, it was equally impossible to a Peter-type mind, just in different ways.

The fact that he wasn't asking about it was driving Neal around the bend.

But Peter didn't ask, and continued to not ask. He parked outside the Burke townhouse without ever asking, by which point Neal was about ready to explode.

At the door of the Burkes' house, El greeted him with an unexpected but not unwelcome hug. "I understand from Peter's texts that you two had an exciting day. Dinner's still a couple of hours away."

She looked up at Peter with a questioning expression, as he took her in his arms and then buried his face in her shoulder. For the first time, Neal got the impression that Peter actually did understand what had almost happened to him today, even if he wasn't asking questions for some blasted weird reason.

Peter hugged El hard for a long time, and then kissed her forehead and whispered, just loud enough for Neal to hear, "Show him."

El frowned up at him. "Hon?"

"Show him," Peter repeated, and tipped his head in Neal's direction. With his hands on El's shoulders, he steered her gently toward the backyard.

Her bafflement faded slowly into comprehension, but she was still frowning. "Hon, he can't --"

"Just ... trust me," he said, and pressed his cheek to hers, then released her into the sunshine of the backyard.

The Burkes' backyard was a garden, in riotous summer bloom, tended by El's hands. In some weird way it had always reminded Neal of his mother's garden, the one she'd kept in the early days in St. Louis, before things got really bad. Now Elizabeth walked into the middle of it, turned back and looked at the two of them, with the sunlight shining down from above her in a golden halo and flowers cascading all around.

Peter was leaning against the wall, with a smile that combined love and pride with, perhaps, just a hint of smugness.

Neal hesitated in the doorway. There was a part of him that already knew what he was about to see, but he couldn't quite believe it.

Elizabeth smiled at him, a smile meant just for him, and then her eyes lit up and the wings burst from her shoulders and arched high above her, translucent and glorious and made up of all the colors of the rainbow.


End file.
